World Enough and Time (22 page)

As usual, Marvell's constituency letters at this time are found pleading that ‘busynesse dos so multiply of late that I can scarce snatch time to write to you'.
17
As well as the committee on the causes of the fire, he refers to another on which he seems to have been a member, tasked ‘to receiue informations of the insolence of Popish Priests & Jesuites & of the increase of Popery'. The strong English tradition of anti-popery was always linked to paranoia about secret conspiracies with co-religionists among the European powers. At a time of war, when France was an enemy, conspiracy theories would find a more fertile soil and anti-popery could be made to seem a patriotic gesture. The committee recommended to the King a range of punitive measures against Catholics, such as the expulsion of non-native ‘Popish Priests and Jesuits', the removal of all civil and military office-holders who refused the oath of allegiance and the oath of supremacy and an insistence that all MPs took these oaths. ‘Many informations are daily brought in to the two Committees about the Fire of London & the insolence of Papists,'
18
Marvell reported to the latest Mayor of Hull, Richard Franke, at the end of October. Marvell was ready to believe that there was a Catholic plot involved in the fire and promised the Hull burgesses that the reports about to be published would contain ‘things of extraordinary weight and which if they were not true might haue bin thought incredible'.
19

The other major preoccupation of the House was raising further money to prosecute the Dutch War, which was costing much more than anyone could have guessed. Members ran through a range of revenue-raising options that included foreign and domestic excise, a poll bill, land taxes and a chimney tax. The dilemma for Marvell, as for his fellow MPs, was how to meet the King's necessity for money, which at a time of war was clearly also the nation's need, without adding to the tax burden on his provincial merchant electorate. The King was seeking £1.8 million. ‘For indeed as the urgency of his Majestyes affairs exacts the mony so the sense of the nations extreme necessity makes us exceedingly tender whereupon to fasten our resolutions,' he explained delicately to Mayor Franke. ‘One thing I observe that as the house is much in earnest to furnish his Majestyes present occasions so they are very carefull to prevent the perpetuating of any Imposition.'
20
A poll tax was proposed of one shilling a head payable (two shillings for ‘all nonconformists and papists') and a highly ingenious measure for supporting the domestic wool trade against foreign competition: ‘That all persons shall be buried in woollen for these next six or seuen years.'
21
Coupled to a recent measure in support of the native flax trade, it was hoped this device would result in £100,000 a year being diverted to domestic wool rather than ‘forain linnen'. Marvell's dedication to these financial and commercial matters is impressive. Although he depended on the Corporation for his ‘knight's pence' and could thus not afford to appear neglectful of their interests, he seems to have had a genuine feel for the minutiae of public and business affairs, nourished perhaps by regular conversations with his nephew William Popple.

At the end of the year, just before Christmas, the Corporation once again expressed its appreciation of their MP's efforts. He wrote back graciously on 22 December: ‘I thank you for your kind present of our Hull liquor.'
22

16

An Idol of State

Here lies the sacred Bones

Of
Paul
late gelded of his Stones.

Here lie Golden Briberies,

The price of ruin'd Families.

By the start of 1667 English euphoria about the Dutch War – which had reached its peak eighteen months earlier in the great naval triumph off Lowestoft, when sixteen ships of the Dutch fleet were sunk and nine more captured with the loss of 2,000 lives – began to ebb. It was costing a great deal of money and the enemy was recouping its strength, though no one could have predicted the great national humiliation that would come in June and bring the war to an abrupt end. One significant opponent of the war, the Chancellor, Clarendon, would become one of its principal casualties. Marvell would take an active part in attempts at his impeachment.

The new session of Parliament in January began with the old rancour over revenue and a new clash between Commons and Lords, the latter resolving to ignore the Poll Tax Bill and to make its own recommendations to the King on the matter, an act that Marvell found ‘unparlamentary and a dangerous precedent'.
1
Although these disagreements occurred in the public sphere, Marvell displayed an odd reticence in his reporting of them to Hull. His account was ‘fit for your privacy if not secrecy',
2
he advised the Corporation, referring ten days later to it as ‘a silent alarme'
3
that was now patched up. Perhaps he was reluctant to encourage negative rumours about Parliament at this difficult time, though he generally needed little incentive to practise reticence and caution.

There was no restraint, however, about the combined reports of the Great Fire and the ‘insolence of Papists'. The former, Marvell promised, would be ‘full of manifest testimonys that it was by a wicked designe'.
4
He was convinced that it was no accident and that he knew the general identity of the likely culprits. When a spate of small fires at Hull was reported to him in February, Marvell warned his constituents to take care. ‘We haue had so much of them here in the South,'
5
he advised, ‘that it makes me almost superstitious. But indeed as sometimes there arise new diseases, so there are seasons of more particular judgements such as that of fires seems of late to have been upon this Nation.' A more practical measure was the bill for the rebuilding of the City after the devastation of the fire, funded in part by the imposition of a tax on coal imports. A bill ‘against Atheisme & prophane Swearing'
6
was also under consideration.

Early in 1667 the government resolved to enter into negotiations to secure peace in a war that had little justification other than commercial greed and rivalry. Louis XIV of France was about to invade the Spanish Netherlands and was easily persuadable out of his alliance with the Dutch because hostility to England was not necessary to his grander design. ‘We haue some hope of a good alliance or of a Peace God grant it,'
7
Marvell told Hull on 2 February. But two months later, in a letter to Lord Wharton in April, he reported: ‘The Dutch are in great preparation for warre … So that upon the Change, our Merchants are but in ill heart and hope very litle of peace.'
8
Peace would indeed come, confirmed by the treaty signed at Breda on 31 July, but as a result of something altogether more disagreeable. On 12 June 1667 the Dutch fleet boldly sailed up the River Medway, broke through the protective boom that guarded Chatham harbour, burnt four ships of the line and towed away the
Royal Charles,
at 80 guns the largest vessel of the fleet. This unexpected humiliation by the Dutch effectively ended the war. ‘The Peace truly I think is concluded,'
9
Marvell reported to Hull on 25 July. Parliament was prorogued until October but the political repercussions were only just beginning. Clarendon was dismissed, but it did not assuage the public anger at what they perceived as mismanagement of the war. Cromwell's great naval victories had not been forgotten and there was a suspicion that not all the money voted for the war had necessarily found its way to the naval struggle. The damage to the King's reputation was considerable. Any satirist worth his salt would now be thinking of setting pen to paper.

But Marvell's first satire of the reign of Charles II was the poem ‘Clarindon's House-Warming'. His authorship of this poem is disputed. It is certainly not among his best and illustrates the problem that modern readers have with Marvell's satires. Copious contemporary references and allusions are the stuff of political satire, in the present day as much as in Marvell's, but appreciation of the wit and nuance of poems addressed to the political situation of the 1660s and 1670s requires historical knowledge. These are poems that demand to be read with explanatory footnotes, but by impeding the flow of attention they can qualify the enthusiasm of many readers.

Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon, was a lawyer by profession and had been a friend of the poets Ben Jonson and Edmund Waller. He was always opposed to what he called ‘the rebellion' and advised Charles I on legal and constitutional matters, as well as serving as Charles II's closest adviser both before and after the Restoration. From 1660 onwards he was probably the most powerful figure in the government, but by 1667 his dominance was nearly over. Court intrigue and the hostility of Parliament – which Marvell naturally shared – led to his dismissal as Chancellor in 1667 and subsequent impeachment. Before he could be imprisoned he fled to France where, after completing his
History of the Rebellion
and his autobiography, he died at Rouen in 1674.

In 1664 Clarendon had begun building an impressive house near St James. Its grandeur and pretension, and the soaring bill for its construction, became notorious; it ended up costing three times the original estimate. It was from here that Clarendon fled to France. On the eve of his departure he was visited by the diarist John Evelyn who described the great, gouty English conservative ‘in his garden at his new-built palace, sitting in his gout wheel-chair, and seeing the gates setting up towards the north and the fields. He looked and spoke very disconsolately … Next morning he was gone.'
10
Clarendon himself was to confess that the building project had ‘infinitely discomposed his whole Affairs and broken his estate'.
11
Because of his involvement in the controversial sale of Dunkirk in 1662 for 500,000 pistoles it was nicknamed Dunkirk House. On 14 June, Pepys wrote in his diary that: ‘some rude people have been … at my Lord Chancellor's where they have cut down the trees before his house and broke his windows; and a gibbet either set up before or painted upon his gate, and these words writ: “Three sights to be seen: Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren Queen.”'
12
(Tangier was part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza whom the King had married in 1661 hoping that she would bring him an heir, but she proved barren.) Clarendon, unpopular and widely blamed for more than he was actually culpable, was thus a soft target for a satirist.

Marvell's poem – if it was his – was written between the summoning of Parliament on 25 June and its first meeting on St James's Day, 25 July. The underlying theme is that Clarendon House has been built on the spoils of a corrupt political career – ‘His Friends in the Navy would not be ingrate,/To grudge him some Timber who fram'd them the War' – and the satire is generally unsophisticated, mildly scatological, and little more than routinely derisive. Formally, it is crude in its jogging rhythms and sometimes laboured rhymes. There is no trace of the playful wit, inventive imagery, verbal felicity, or political insight that characterised the great political poems Marvell wrote in the 1650s. Far more considerable as a poem is ‘The last Instructions to a Painter' which Marvell – again, if he was truly its author – wrote later in the summer, between 30 August when Clarendon resigned his seals, and 29 November when he fled to France.

On 26 June 1656, elated by a naval victory over the Turks in a war that had dragged on for ten years, the Venetians threw themselves into a frenzy of celebration. The city rulers appointed a committee to choose a painter to record the scene. The successful candidate was Pietro Liberi, whose work was to be displayed in the Sala dello Scrutino in the Doges' Palace where it can still be seen. It is entitled
Battaglia dei Dardanelli
or, more familiarly,
Lo Schiavo
because of the large nude figure of a slave that dominates the picture. The poet Giovanni Francesco Busenello, also greatly excited by the victory in the Dardanelles and eager to celebrate the victory, addressed a poem to Liberi, either to help him secure the commission or to congratulate him on his success. It was a novel idea for a poem to be designed in the form of instructions to a painter on the elements and proportion of a picture. Two years later the poem was translated by Sir Thomas Higgons, a diplomat and man of letters, as ‘A Prospective of the Naval Triumph of the Venetians over the Turk: To Signor Pietro Liberi that Renowned and famous Painter by Gio. Francesco Busenello'. The Italian original was a revision and expansion of a poem written immediately after the naval victory by Busenello, initially in the Venetian dialect.

Both the poem and Higgons's translation might have remained minor historical curiosities had the poet Edmund Waller not decided to appropriate the genre in his ‘Instructions to a Painter' of 1666. Between that date and the end of the century the genre had a vigorous flowering. It was seen as a useful device for holding together a great deal of otherwise disparate material. Its uses were satirical rather than celebratory and, according to one historian of the genre, these satires are ‘direct and fierce, marked by a bitter invective, savage indictments, scurrility and coarseness'.
13
In December 1666 Samuel Pepys had been presented with an anonymous example of this now flourishing genre which he called ‘the lampoon, or the
Mock Advice to a Painter,
abusing the Duke of York and my Lord Sandwich, Pen, and everybody, and the King himself, and all the matters of the navy and war'.
14
Pepys describes what appears to be a typical product of the genre. It was in fact a follow-up to Waller's poem, called ‘Second Advice to a Painter, For Drawing the History of our Navall Business; In Imitation of Mr Waller'. The same author produced a ‘Third Advice to a Painter' early in January 1667, and both these sequels to Waller infuriated the censors of the Stationers' Company when they were printed by a Francis Smith of the Elephant and Castle in the Strand. Two more followed, the ‘Fourth Advice to the Painter' and the ‘Fifth Advice', and all four were published in 1667 as
Directions To a Painter For Describing our Naval Business: In Imitation of Mr Waller Being The Last Works of Sir John Denham.
The book also appended ‘Clarindon's House-Warming' ‘By an Unknown Author'. The attribution to Denham has generally been doubted and may be there simply to lend dignity to an unlicensed publication or distract attention from the true author. Marvell's contemporaries, John Aubrey and Anthony Wood, believed that the real author of the
Advices
attributed to Denham was Marvell and some modern editors have agreed with them (at any rate so far as the ‘Second' and ‘Third' advices are concerned).
15
In his entry on Denham in the
Athenae Oxoniensis,
Wood says: ‘To which
Directions,
tho' sir John Denham's name is set, yet they were thought by many to have been written by Andr. Marvell, esq. The printer that printed them, being discover'd, stood in the pillory for the same.'
16
It is probably prudent to concur with the editors of the standard Oxford edition of the poems that ‘The last Instructions to a Painter' is the only one of this sequence that is reliably Marvell's – though they attribute to him also a later poem, of 1671, ‘Further Advice to a Painter'.